


Hush Baby

by Evandar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Possession, Thoughts of Infanticide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-04-29 14:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5131745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s something wrong with her sister’s son and it’s not just his magic. Petunia fears him more than she’s ever been afraid of anything, but she can’t hurt him either. She can only wait.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hush Baby

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks, as always, to my beta S for her tireless patience, and to the fabulous Mab and Writcraft for their work running this fest.

The boy comes wrapped in a baby blue blanket patterned with white clouds and tiny, darting golden balls. He scrunches up his face when Petunia shrieks – what _else_ is she supposed to do? – but he doesn’t cry. He doesn’t. He just scrunches up his nose and whines. It’s a thin, tremulous noise that triggers every maternal instinct she has, and she bends down to scoop him up instead of the morning milk.

He’s heavy and warm in her arms. A little younger than Dudley, she thinks; smaller, certainly, but most babies are smaller than Dudley. There’s a livid red cut on the boy’s forehead, shaped like a lightning bolt. The skin around it is puffy and tender-looking. Possibly infected.

There’s a heavy parchment envelope poking out of the baby’s blanket, and her name is written on it in swooping green letters. She knows that handwriting. She knows, even before the baby opens his eyes again, whose he is. And she knows that her sister is dead.

 _Lily_ wouldn’t have left _any_ baby on a doorstep, let alone her own. Not if she was still breathing.

…

The boy, Harry, never cries. Not once. Not when he’s hungry, not when he’s desperate for a change. He comes close, once, when Dudley gets too curious about this strange, silent thing that’s suddenly arrived in the house and pokes him. Harry makes that whining noise again.

It is, for the first few days, the only sound he makes. 

A fever rages in his little body. Petunia ends up staying in the spare room with him, watching his every toss and turn and letting Vernon – always grumbling – tend to Dudley when he needs it. It’ll do him good, she thinks. He doesn’t get to see enough of his son when he’s always at work. She can’t let Lily’s son die, frightened and alone, like her sister did.

The cut on his forehead bleeds.

The medicines the doctors proscribe do nothing.

By the third night of thrashing limbs and sweat-soaked sheets, she’s ready to take him to hospital. She has a bag packed and in the car; her handbag is slung over her shoulder, and she’s leaning over the crib to pick Harry up when he _looks_ at her. He looks at her with such hate and anger that she staggers back, not stopping until she hits the doorframe, unable to make a single sound as the child in the crib finally, finally, screams.

…

There’s something wrong with Lily’s boy.

She knew it the night his fever vanished. She knows it now, watching his every move across the table. He’s a silent, sullen boy who doesn’t need to be taught things. Basic things, like holding a knife and fork or going to the toilet, seem to have been pre-programmed. 

He watches her, and Dudley, with contempt as she teaches those things to her son.

He watches with strange eyes. Cold eyes. Eyes that, until the night his fever broke, had been the same vivid green as Lily’s but are now flecked with red. They make her think of blood spatter every time she looks at him; of how her sister might have looked, murdered.

She hates those eyes. She would give anything to be able to avoid them, but she can’t. She’d rather live with the contempt and the nightmares his stares give her, than leave him unsupervised for so much as a minute.

…

She can’t keep the boy trapped in the house forever. There are laws about that sort of thing, and besides, Vernon won’t stand for it. He finds the boy eerie, but he puts it down to magic rather than the boy himself. He doesn’t spend enough time around him – or around Dudley, for that matter – to understand that children don’t act like this. But the alternative – the idea of setting him loose on the community; on a _Primary school_ \- seems so much worse.

She goes through the motions. She buys him uniforms and supplies along with Dudley’s, though she tailors Harry’s things to his more serious palate. Blacks and greys for his pens and notebooks and pencil case. She buys him things for adults, rather than the cartoon-emblazoned products for children, because Harry is the boy who curls up with the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ when he’s bored instead of the television remote.

She buys him things for school, and waits for someone – anyone – to stop her. To please, _please_ stop her.

No one comes.

No one stops her.

Even _Harry_ doesn’t stop her when she places his uniform on his bed on his first day of school. He looks up at her with those cold, hating eyes and presses his lips tightly together in disapproval – an expression she recognises, insanely, as one of her own – but he gets dressed without a word.

He’s five years old, and Petunia has never heard him speak.

She doesn’t want to hear him speak. She doesn’t want to hear what he might have to say.

She takes them on the bus. Vernon took the car to work that morning, leaving her to navigate public transport. Dudley is excited. Of course he is, and she listens to his chatter with a patient ear – she _aches_ for her son and the sheltered life he’s had. He’s desperate to make friends and have children that aren’t Harry close by. She needs him to make them too, but she worries. She worries about the possibility of violence in Harry’s small frame, and how – or where – it might be directed.

She watches him as Dudley talks. He stares out of the window at passing shops and houses with a blank face – she can see his reflection in the glass. He meets her gaze. She shudders and winds her arm around Dudley’s shoulders.

Oh, _God_ , but no one is going to stop this.

…

Surrounded by parents and their children at the school gate, she has a role to play. With Dudley, the fussing is easy. She hugs him and kisses him for as long as he’ll let her before he squirms out of her grasp and runs to find his possible first friend.

Harry stands. Cold. The fussing is harder with him, but she manages to bring herself to touch his wild hair - _so_ like Lily’s husband’s – and smooths it down over his forehead with its faded scar.

It’s cruel that he’s such a beautiful child.

She crouches down to look into his eyes. _Soulless_ , she thinks. She shoves the thought aside.

“Will you be good?” she asks him.

She doesn’t expect an answer. She never does. She lets her hand drop to his thin shoulder and feels the sharp wing of his shoulder blade beneath her fingertips. The smile that creeps over his face is a thin, wicked parody of the expression.

“If it suits me,” he says. She flinches, stares, but before she can withdraw from him like she longs to, he grips her wrist with ice cold fingers and _squeezes_.

He’s small enough, fragile enough, that Petunia could break his grip with ease, but the shock of his voice and the implied threat of his actions leave her frozen. A rabbit before a snake.

“You, and your gibbering infant, are fortunate that it _does_ currently suit my purposes to behave,” he says. His voice is quiet and eerily shrill, and the sound of it sends ice sliding down her spine. “But you _will_ regret this.”

His smile spreads into something that – had it reached his eyes – would pass for genuine. “See you after school, Aunt Petunia!” he says, slithering out from under her hand.

 _She will regret this._ She laughs softly, and covers her mouth with her hand. She already does. She’s spent the last four years regretting not smothering him to death that morning she found him on her doorstep. 

“Six years,” she says to herself, standing up straight and watching Harry’s progress as he headed straight for an unoccupied corner of the playground. 

Six more years and he’ll be Dumbledore’s problem once more. She can’t _wait_.

**Author's Note:**

> Please feel free to comment here, on [livejournal](http://hp-darkarts.livejournal.com/124443.html), or in both places.


End file.
